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For me this has been one of the most puzzling aspects of living. The need for assurance, reassurance, security, safety has had an iron grip on my decisions. If I am safe enough, if I can careful enough, I will not die. Ever.

My poetry and art book Laying It on The Line from lulu.com

How can I best move in the world in a way which will most clearly insure that I am not at risk? As my eyes scan the horizon, I am like a primitive, I am child like. I am like a surviver of old wars. Where is the danger? How do I blend in, stay in the centre of the herd, avoid catastrophe?

In actuality, most of the shattering, panic inducing damage has already been imprinted on my body and subconscious. The flack jacket of caution and indecision is thrown over a body already carrying broken bones, familial trauma and the woundings of childhood. The war I fear has already happened to me.

looking for clarity in chaos. my art

I have come to know that my urge to protect myself is actually quite silly. It is like having a phobia to clowns when you live in a circus. And yes 15 clowns can get in one tiny car.

So the issue of what particular decision I make precisely now has to be detached from perceived merit. If I do this thing, in the future I anticipate this particular reward.

Knowing I cannot know. my art

I have come to see that kind of linear, protestant, constrained energy has not served me. I have come to see that I cannot anticipate which pulses I send out into the universe will eventually have an intended efficacy. How can I know what lessons I need to learn?

As I look back at 73 years of my life, I see that in the moment I frequently had no idea what I was experiencing, what I was going through. There was no way of judging if it could be assessed as a good thing, a neutral thing or a damaging experience ultimately.

The body itself is the greatest compass for travelling in the stormy confusions of stories we tell ourselves. The body reacts to that which is an assault on our well being. Always.

needing to see my artwork

If the breath is present in a gentle, fulsome way; if the body is not releasing cortisol and adrenaline; if the body feels grounded and solid, there is no need to use the mind to assess anything. The mind is like the relative who shows up and repeatedly tells old stories. Everything becomes a mind worm.

If the body is excited and in love with the project, the ideas, the creation of a new experience, then the worthiness of moving into this new engagement will show itself eventually.

Knowing that the value of a situation cannot be understood by the mind is so much simpler. Only a deep engagement with the present allows full, complete trust.

experiencing. body

As I stack stones one by one to create a garden wall, I feel the sun on my back. Overhead a fifty year old maple tree has green baby fists of leaf buds. Everywhere around me birds are telling one another stories. My body tells me peace. My mind has stopped assessing and just sleeps.

Spiritual blindness clouds my vision at times. I keep returning to the programmed scripts of scarcity, competition, victimhood and this flat paper doll world construct where in we are standing in our underwear waiting for some outside source to dress us up. The giant hand will cover the shame of who we are without acceptable stylish cover. The controlling hand will give us the fabric of status. We will be anointed by validation. We will be absolved of our denuded humanity by the powerful outside authority.

The distance between where we believe we can go and where we can get to belief is always something I am aware of. Like someone walking in a mirage desert projecting in a landscape of oasis, my programmed reality is at odds with that which my spirit knows to be true.

The big work for me is to release the struggle. How do I go from what I am now to what I know myself capable of being? Where is the map? What are the instructions? Am I supposed to read it by the full of the moon or with a candle held behind it so I can see the tracings of the journey?

Like some lost, skitterish animal, meditation finds me stuck in a gully, or trapped under loose scree. Meditation brings me back to the container of now, of breath, of body, of allowing all of the fear-pain-anger to just exist in now.

we live in a grid

What my practice has done for me is to allow me to push the “Start Over” button. I have also found that sitting silence or chanting until my tears fall without check allows me to be loving to myself. I return to my intention to stay in the experience of growth.

In the past, I was in a self created classroom not unlike the one my mother described in the 1930’s. When she made a mistake, the ruler marks raised welts on her hands. When she did not learn at a rate or at a predetermined level of performance, she had to sit on a tall stool wearing a tall hat.

In the past, I was in the classroom of perfectionism and I was brutal and unforgiving of myself.

Meditation allows me to push the re-set intention button. I start again. I view myself with loving kindness. Because I have come to understand that being human is basically a bitch, I know to be kind. Because I have come to appreciate that being born into a body IS the hell we all fear mistakenly fear in the afterlife, I have come to be more compassionate to all of us.

William James knew

One time when I was in Floatspace, I saw the souls as lights. They were in the waiting room between lives and each one chose to come down the shoot of energy into his or her mother. Each one made the commitment to come to earth and agree to be born. As I floated in the salt water, I saw a hundred thousand lights travelling to earth to agree to enter a body. They agreed to suffer pain, face death, walk in the mass delusion of whatever their culture had constructed because they wanted to learn.

We see what we believe

It takes my breath away, the bravery of souls. We are here to learn. I am here to learn. And it is through meditation that I can keep my focus and like an adventurer ask the question: What is the real map?

I get lost. I stumble. I forget to be grateful. But I know that this life is where it all happens. It is where we truly learn to love.

Slowly the ice fort that the snow plow and I have built around my car is disappearing. At times, I take my square sharp shovel and chip away. When it warms up, I slide the snow shovel underneath and open up the passage ways. I am creating a path for easier movement.

The resolve to sit and write, to take time to work through the blocks that have arisen is renewed in me lately. Chipping away at a frustration; building my skills without a particular end game in mind will lead me where I need to go.

The enemy is contentment. I have enough money… if I am careful and don’t stretch my neck out into Middle Class acquisitiveness. I have familiar comfort. But the black out curtain of boredom restricts my light.

At times I yearn for a new environment, one in which I cannot anticipate the path. Exploration, adventure, serendipity are somewhere else.

The well worn path I had trodden is the polished stone walkway of discipline. The habits are the groves I have made. I am working now to get myself down in a chair and develop my focus on creating the adventure in my exploration of language. The time, which has for so many years been a burden upon me, the time of “it doesn’t matter” and “there is nothing you have to do” has been marked with no hands, no click movement of minutes.

I don’t seek struggle but rather just to deepen my commitment to developing myself. And distraction, entertainment, diversion have been the central pond of my day. I have soaked in it for hours.

I tell myself I am learning as I watch movies. I tell myself I am connecting as I lurk a voyeur to friends on face book. I tell myself I am being careful with my money as I go to three stores to buy one item.

But really, what is it that I wish to discover in my life? That is the question. How can I patiently sit and work through my thoughts, honing ideas, reaching out to new possibilities of internal connection? It is by once again connecting to the clock and going back to work.

I am frequently like some floppy large-eared cartoon character. I just doh de doh down the road with a semi-hopping rhythm and singing stories to myself.

Doh de doh de doh, I bring my knees up to a gangly kind of energetic goofy gait. And it is fine. This is my road. This is my way. This is how I walk.

But when disruption hits, the old messages become more easy to see. That stumbly crumbly road was not a good choice.

Find Your Way

I stumble on the path. The path fails to hold me and crumbles. So whether it is a stumble or a crumble, I am on the ground asking the question, “How did I get here?”

The world is going through a disruption right now. The US election; the blatant disregard for the lives of entire groups of people; the phantom haunting fears for the planet; the sense that we have lost our knowing where we belong, are all acting as disruptors.

Recently, I have been going back to Daryl Anka’s channel Bashar for some clarity. Last night as I viewed a You Tube Video I heard him talk about Dissociative Cultural Conditioning Disorder. It is actually a wonderful moment when a person is disrupted so violently that he or she begins to see the cultural conditioning that has held the person as a hostage.

The mental constructs; the tribal values; the reinforcing of what is “correct” and what is “deviant” is deeply embedded in our consciousness.

When an individual achieves Dissociative Cultural Conditioning others may see it as a disorder at first. The woven fabric of a society may interpret it as a tear or a shredding. It is a bad thing. But as more and more people leave behind the concept that validation comes from exterior sources, they will step up and change their lives from an interior understanding of power.

So the old systems are experiencing shock. The road is crumbling and people are stumbling. As they fall and scrape knees or elbows or bang their noggins, they will blame someone else for it. They will become angry at their facebook friends, or get into a values knife fight at the family Christmas table.

Holding on to the understanding that every single disruption in my life has helped me to grow is helpful. It is the time now when the failure of the old system is so blatantly obvious that there is absolutely no space left for stopping and discussing it.

Find another road quickly, find another way of thinking quickly, find another way of being in the world as rapidly as you can. And embrace Dissociative Cultural Conditioning disorder in order to find a way to be more compassionate in the world.

Ultimately, it is a good thing. And try not to jab a fork into your relatives at Christmas.

When I am driving a car, I notice that whatever conditions surround me my mind will latch on to. If it is blinding snow, I build out the narrative that the entire 16 hours will be a wrestling hold on the steering wheel: The experience becomes a fierce concentration to avoid the looming ghost shadow of death which might appear at any time in concentrated darkness out of the white.

In rain, I envision a world of planing on the road at the next curve, or this next curve, or another curve further on that I cannot now see. All I need to do is lose my focus on my imminent demise and I will cease being in this body. Fate will take me.

Christmas has been a time for me that I liken to driving in bad weather. Because the “systems” I have experienced in the past are hard wired into my navigation system, I imagine that further down the road, say Christmas 2017, Christmas 2018 will be simply the continuance of the bathos sound track of isolation; being misunderstood; abandonment and resultant despair.

It fascinated me that even with my rigorous studies; my sitting at the feet of masters; my meditation practice and my prodigious reading, the “whether” systems keep building out.

As I was sweeping the snow off of the sidewalk to a quality of clearness that would easily match up with my neighbour’s standards so I could “fit in,” I thought about the traces of old stories that I still carry.

The system is no longer as loud or persistent. It is no longer presenting as reality. But if it were a movie, the main character would have translucent images appearing and partially obscuring clear vision for short periods of time. The audience would know that these are just interference footage clips. It is a hallucination that does not interfere with action.

Mindfully watching. Allow.

I continue to move forward as a stronger believer in my own ability to love my way out of dark places.

It is like driving… and the bad weather was just something that happened a few hours back. The past never predicts the future. Clear roads are here. The snow has passed. My sidewalk is indistinguishable from the neighbours’ on two sides.

Right now, I am just curious. I am curious about who I am becoming; about how I will be in the world; about what my gifts can do to help others. I loosen my hands on the wheel, remember to breathe and know enough to know weather is not fate. And everything passes.

The question of how I move in the world comes more and more frequently to mind.

Because I am so open to vibrations, when I am in a group that carries lower energy it feels like I am experiencing an operation with out anaesthetic. Groups of people who hold an agreement that the world is blighted; that the focus should be on an accumulation of status symbols; that the only strength is the strength of power which can be easily perceived by others around them, hold no comfort for me.

The Angel Michael’s secret name is, according to Edgar Cayce and others, based on the Sabbath. Michael’s power is the power of going inward, of sitting silence, of finding the soul spark of life seed that is truly the signature of self. And I embrace that way of life.

I isolate myself for days on end as I read, sit silence and turn to teachers contemporary or from the past. Because of the limitations of the body and the limitations of the human experience there is at one time, only so much instruction at a time that I can embrace and allow to incorporate into my world view.

Always, always my mind comes back to the question: Is this helping me to be a better human being? Is what I am learning helping me to rise above petty, limiting reactions? How much is the experience of this single life constricting me to doing no more than living out the experiences of this single life.

Great meditators, Shamans and spiritual teachers seem to have achieved a balance between sitting contemplation and working in the world.

However, for me the idea of a balance is a huge area of fear energy.

How do I remove myself from imprinting groups that flash white teeth, expensive purses, garish displays of consumption as their miles posts for their growth? How do I manage myself when I perceive there is a darkness in a group that is taking them off purpose. I have had no role models to teach me.

When I was younger, I simply tried to use words; I repeatedly tried to use logic; I vainly tried to argue the case and it never worked.

For the last seven years I have cycled from isolated periods to periods of being out in the world more frequently.

“Once burned twice shy. ” That is the saying and for me, because of my childhood and resultant habits, I have been wary and guarded. The ability to feel energy; the moments of channelling information with no support or teacher have sent me to a place of shutting down socially as a default behavior.

If there were no ” jobs” for me to do, I would not appear. Workaholism was a gift because it got me out around people.
My Obsessive Compulsive nature was a gift because I would allow myself to be with others in order to achieve a goal.

The work I have done on myself has been prodigious. Almost instantaneously, I can check into my body and understand what it is feeling. My ability to see past mental patterns arising has become much stronger of late.

The question still lays on the table: “How am I meant to be in the world?”

Today, I decided to let the concept of supporting others be enough of a attraction to lead me out of the house. How can I support others in their growth?

To be constantly interior or protective of my own energy does not help me to learn from my weaknesses how to gain strength. On the other hand, I am wise enough now to know that I must never allow my energy to serve another who is corrupted by a lack of understanding. I do not blame the person. I just will not allow myself to become a log on their fire.

Reflections Perceptions

What I look for in others is what a child looks for. Is this person kind to me and to others? Is this person gentle in their passage through life? Is this person able to see themselves clearly enough to say, “Opps. There was my ego again. Sorry.”

Being authentic means always observing oneself and others in the world. I no longer fall for the people who walk into the room puffed up with power.

My journey is to understand that each of us has power already. We came into life with a “golden ticket.”

It is my work to figure out how I am to be in the world. I don’t need to audition. I already have a ticket.

It has been neither nor, not either or lately. The weather has caused the persistence of my flowers setting hopeful buds and the continued infill of grass in the bald spot in my lawn.

Trees heavy with no snow

I have also been floating in some kind of bubble since I returned from Los Angeles for the Airbnb conference. There I was surrounded by 15000 other hosts and constant stimulation.

I followed my “open door” policy that I adhere to when I am travelling. If a door is open, I go in. I found an architecture school retrospective and a feminist film festival. The experience was delightful and I felt happy, excited and at home.

Los Angels looks like a Castle in the distance

Getting back to Kelowna was less stimulating. I fell into distraction mode by watching netflix every evening.

So I am neither totally at home as I stretch out my desire fingers for more stimulus, nor ready to travel. It is an in-between state.

I find myself thinking a great deal about Christmas.

Christmas is, basically, about time. It is when we slide from past images of ourselves surrounded or trapped; supported or sabotaged by our immediate family.

Rituals are powerfully present. The old ornaments are dug out of boxes. The archived rituals like museum displays of half remembered or reconstructed narratives surround us.

Some try to recreate what went before and others like survivors of an undisclosed war suffer flash back intensity moments.

out my winter window

Another group tries to sand away the family chisled pictograph stories and start again.

The pressure from the societal mindset to experience the “most wonderful time of the year” leads to scarcity mind. Comparisons lurk everywhere. It is a time of the highest suicide rate in Western culture.

The chasm lies like an earthquake severed landscape between what we are told we “should” be experiencing and what we have actually experienced in our lives.

We react by mainlining… main landing on the sugar, fat, booze and entertainment surface. Or we jingle bell our credit cards to buy promises of pleasure.

We are desperate to cover up the crevassed split between that which we see in our own lives and the mythical saccharine made for TV movies.

But we do have the ability to walk about this shifting landscape and between the seasons with grace and skill.

We each find our own way forward to the place where our own version of the everyday super hero lives.

We can move away from the seasonal quaff from the cup of bitterness or booze. We can clear see the mindless expectation that are trying to script our decisions.

Getting to the next thing… the next season… the next stage of who we are becoming is an immense relief.

The question is: “Who am I now?”

“Who am I now?”

“Who am I now?”

We step as children into our own past and re-author all of it with every new thought.

Freedom to love comes from freedom from the old stories.

What is this time that now holds me?

The season moves to a wall of cold and winter shows up. Christmas shows up with so much possibility.

my livingroom sanctuary

We are free to run towards others with a child like innocence and love. I am here. I showed up.

He or she stands aside from society, in order to observe, in order to understand what the “game” is that is going on. A writer, an artist moves from the position of “in the game” and then “out of the game.”

There is a certain solitude that is both a gift and a curse. It is like watching people eating poi in a joy filled ceremony and thinking, “That looks delicious.” However, after tasting the culturally infused dish, the artist is reinforced in the separateness. Poi is tasteless, joyless, unsatisfying.

So making the decision to be at peace with not being at peace is vital. Disabusing oneself that the idea of being “in ” the circle, or “out” of the circle of inclusion is the answer is an important step.

Byron Katie in her systematic analysis of thoughts calls it “The Work”. The important moment is when a person stands facing another and in that moment knows clearly what it is the individual wants from that other person.

I frequently ask: What are my expectations for being in my society; what are my expectations for being a cultural anthropologist who simply observes the behavioural choices?

So the being able to see the down to earth, the actual, the spinning out of actions based on the story of a culture is central to an artist’s life. There is a deep feeling of loneliness that all artist-observers experiences. But it is a necessary vantage point in order to create out of a disengaged truth.

It is frequently the artist/seers who were most out of tune with their own culture who propelled the society forward. Matisse was vilified. His vision became the norm.

Artists/writers/seers move in and out of society. Their lives cycle from boredom, to risk and excitement. They come to trust the inner compass more fully as they mature.

One has to trust that the path is created by the step forward. And there are always those well lit places with flat land where the group gathers and shares their maps. There are those inspiration stops where the exchanging of ideas are vitally energizing.

Finally, the question of “Do I fit in?” becomes irrelevant. And the question, “Who am I now?” becomes the call to clarity. The relationship with self calls for the practice of compassion in movement, or in stillness. All is correct. Just observe and witness.

My goal is to walk so softly on the ground. But there are times I stumble, swear, feel blinded by some fog created by my urge to keep myself safe and protected.

The tension between the urge to create, go big, just fucking DO something and the necessity to be careful, orderly, not to take risks or attract too much attention from the Eye of Sauron has pretty much been the back beat track of the movie of my life.

What my ego is constantly whispering to me is ,”Not good enough. Not enough effort. You could have been so much bigger than this version of yourself. Why did you waste your time, your focus, your energy, your day, your week, your life!”

I think of those heart-felt movies where in a marathon runner has his crippled little brother on his back. He chooses to run with the weight of the destroyed relative throughout the race. At times, I see my ego that way. I just keep carrying him or her or it with me and sometimes the being is just too heavy for me to run the marathon with any spectacular results.

But that image and message, too, are from the ego weight creature I carry.

At present I have been evolving in the way I almost inevitably do. It seems to be my style. I am stoic and patient for a time with an issue and use my super human suppression skills to cloak the problem in a field of invisibility. And then I stumble onto the next plan hidden behind the bushes.

My neck has disintegrating discs which have radiated migraines, ear aches and jackhammer skull pain for decades. It has gradually gotten better as I build the strength in my body and learn to work on flexibility.

My digestion has been a mess since I witnessed the Paris Attacks on the street where I was staying in November.

My message to myself is highly nuanced: I am doing well. I am armoured and impervious.

I had only one flashback after seeing the blood and hearing the screams of those dying. I have had no nightmares at all. I congratulated myself for staying in a field of love during and after the attack. There was no hatred or personal fear arising.

But my body has had unpredictable purges since December. I am clearing. I am clearing unexpectedly, rather constantly.

So somewhere along the way, I decided to deal with the ignored messages from my body.

xxx

First I went to body talk and the reader said I was carrying massive amounts of pain but it was not my pain. It was pain from others that had lodged in my body. She placed her hands on my spine and released tension which I could feel leaving like water from a burst pipe. The flowing out of that which I had been holding was something palpable.

Next, I decided to go for physio. I had two treatments releasing some locked areas in my body around my neck. After the second treatment, I suffered barely endurable pain. And I am tough. I have prided myself on my ability to “take it.”

I felt as if my skull were being attacked with a jackhammer from inside, from my brain. I had a massive migraine, pain shooting up my neck and out of my ears and the constant presence of nausea. I awoke in so much simultaneous distress it was impossible to focus on any one area.

I allowed myself a sugary drink, took a tylenol 3 and decided to just drug myself asleep with gravol.

When I went back for my third treatment, the physio indicated that unlocking knots in the body can allow for information to start flowing that has been repressed. On the right side of my neck is an area that refuses to let go, he informed me.

I pointed out that I had a shard of bone standing up on that side on the front of my shoulder.

He stepped back and looked concerned. He said that it was an indicator of a dislocated shoulder at some time in my past.

When I went home with the new information to add to the missing puzzle bits of my life, I sat with the idea that this happened when I was under the amnesia blanket of my blacked out childhood. I have protected myself by not remembering. I have allowed myself to move forward in a healthy manner by not “knowing” what happened to me.

What is behind the doors.

So in the last four years I have been able to gather further evidence. A energy therapist told me of my broken cheek bone. A woman’s retreat presented the information that not only my father but my grandfather were dangerous to me. And now I own the information that my shoulder was dislocated and never reset properly.

When parents hide the damage to their children so that they will not be found guilty, so much becomes unvalidated experience.

What I have come to understand is that my journey has been about using my mind to reclaim my full presence. I studied. I read. I attended conferences. I went for counselling to Elizabeth Fry on and off for eight years. And then I let it rest.

Next I moved onto working with spirit. I found a group of Catholic nuns who worked with energy and it was while I was attending their support group the entire understanding came to me. I was attacked at 18 months on by those who should have been my protectors.

What I came to accept is that I was lucky to be alive.

The grief was mammoth. I cried almost steadily for three months. I had not know. I had not let myself see. I had not consciously “experienced” the attacks at all. But the suppression was not working in my life.

The spiritual work continued with the guidance of Gabor Mate in a retreat and through his books. My meditation practice became the anchoring center of my life. I began to be able to love and not hide how much others meant to me.

I sat with Peruvian Shamans and with a Black Foot Medicine man. And I read. I read everything about how the brain works, the patterning of DNA. I studied Buddhism, Tao, Hinduism and I opened myself up to the deep connection with spirit.

What I have done in the last three weeks is a result of my adventure. I worked first on knowing that I was determined to survive. Then I used my mind to understand on that first level. The spirit work was only possible because I intellectually understood how important it was to get beyond the mind.

Finally, reconnecting with the messages in my body is the final and most illuminating step. I can only allow those neurological connections to bring messages because I am strong enough now. I have worked out, used weights, established habits of nurture and strengthening my body so that I can actually see how strong I am. That has helped me tremendously.

What happens next? Don’t ask me. I didn’t plan this journey. I just let it take me to where it will. It is only afterward that I can see how “on purpose” my path has been.

“What falls away is always, and is near.”

I no longer fear to be seen. I no longer fear the Eye of Sauron. The greatest evil is to not see who we are and why. The greatest evil is to not allow ourselves to grow by doing whatever it takes. And I wait for the next directives with a vast curiosity. Life is such an adventure.

Emergency is a word that has some poetry. It is lilting, it lifts and falls. It tells the tale of crisis, of system failure, or the sudden and unexpected facing of transitory mortality. Structures will fall. What we hold so tightly in our safe places, our hands, the firebox under the bed, the bank will inevitably fail us. Those we cradle in our arms will disappear as if they were never there.

Everything depends on everything and we have so much trouble understanding. The financial system, the corporate system, the structured systems of distraction and hypnosis are all threads of the same carpet. And it cannot always fly.

Sometimes, because there is no satisfaction guaranteed, because there is no insurance against change, because we are so fragile on the earth, sometimes those things we most believe in, no longer believe in us.

They turn their backs on us, the promises of continuance and protection. They leave us alone, unprotected, in crises.

And it is in the finality of the “emergency room” of life that we finally “emerge.”

When we are stripped of the clothing of the myth of protection, we see who we are.

I have a sense at this time that it is important to focus on my emergence. It is vital that I see the ego oily con woman shell game that I have played.

So many I know are feeling like children left under dressed in a dark forest with winter coming on. There is a pervasive sense of anxiety, of unnamed distress.

I was born in 1944 and I remember the 1950’s with the enamel glaze of prosperity promises while some of us dug fall out shelters in our yard. I remember the 1960’s with the visions of people burning on a cross or on flame running through a ghetto while the TV commercials sang to us about fashion and cigarettes.

I remember the 1970’s when the time of deflated dreams and wounded men was marked by streamlined kitchen appliances.

The society’s surface has always had little coding about what was real. The cognitive disconnect was a habit we were used to like some strange music through our lives.

But never before has the dream vision of buying security been less available to us.

There is no someday soon croon being musak piped in. The distractions are short ineffective bursts. The disruption is happening.

The crisis is as clearly understood by some as the moment when the violin scraping begins in a movie.

It is time to get right with yourself. It is time to allow yourself to develop into a peaceful, calm source of energy.